Entrepreneurs Steve Barnett, Peter Condoleon and Tim Hall have fine-tuned the prototype for their cloud-based, machine lubrication platform GreaseBoss at The Melt in Warners Bay since mid-last year.

The Melt, which specialises in the development of industrial hardware and was launched by Malcolm Turnbull in December 2019, has raised around $1 million from local Hunter angel investors to kick off the first round of seed funding for GreaseBoss.

GreaseBoss has just signed a major contract with mining giant Glencore in its pilot phase and Mr Barnett said its acceptance into Silicon Valley's Y Combinator would be a game-changer.

Over the next three months, GreaseBoss's founders will receive mentoring and daily coaching to help it refine its product and prepare for a Demo Day where they pitch to investors.

"The purpose is to put startups in best position to raise a seed round, which we'll be doing over the next month," he said.

"Y Combinator gives us access to capital from the US that we would not have had any access to if we continued in Australia, which is [comparatively] risk averse. Over there it's like, 'Great, we'll give it a go' and the dollars on offer are five to 10 times more."

GreaseBoss hopes to raise more than US$1 million but that sum could be as much as five times that amount if the raise is oversubscribed.

A mechatronic engineer with experience working in machinery manufacturing, Mr Barnett was selling machinery and visiting mine sites around Australia when he noticed the multiple problems with, and adhoc nature of, the greasing of machinery.

Unplanned 'downtime' is industry jargon for lost operation due to a machinery that suddenly becomes unusable, often due to poor maintenance.

"I wondered why it was so uncontrolled when everything else on a mine site is so controlled," Mr Barnett said.

By then living in Brisbane, he decided to attend some hackathons and pitch his idea to meet potential co-founders who had the right skills to complement his own.

"I needed a team to build [a product] around the problems and I thought if I found guys fresh out of uni, keen as mustard, then we could do a start-up," he says.

He went to at least three events before he finally pitched his idea to win the event - and meet his co-founders: Mr Hall is a mechanical engineer and the company "fixer"; Mr Condoleon is an engineering graduate and the "tech guy"; while Mr Barnett works on sales and strategy.

The GreaseBoss system combines hardware and software to track lubrication of all the machine grease points, known as nipples. The hardware is an attachment that can be placed on the end of a grease fun used to lubricate a machine, while its software allows it to detect where the grease points are, read them and then instruct a user how much needs to be pumped into the machine part.

"It is basically greasing for dummies - anyone can pick up a grease gun and do the greasing because it tells you what to do," he said.

The Melt founder Trent Bagnall said Mr Barnett had attended The Melt launch in 2019 and understood the "power" of its offering to engineering startups.

"The Melt network of Hunter-based investors quickly saw the potential of GreaseBoss with its relevance to the mining, ports, power and logistics market," Mr Bagnall said.

The Warners Bay hub provided GreaseBoss with crucial principal engineering support, early prototype development and important connections to customers, alongside back-office support.

Mr Bagnall said that GreaseBoss solved a simple but lingering problem and was "incredibly relevant" to the Hunter's mining, power and manufacturing industries: "It save them millions of dollars in equipment downtime per year."

GreaseBoss has tested its product at Tomago Aluminium and Mr Barnett said it can be used on "anything that moves" - machinery found in mine sites, sewerage plants, airports, in agriculture and transport.

"Of course, our favourite places are super yachts, breweries, private jets and theme parks," he quipped.

Mr Barnett said since he began the startup he had learned others had tried to develop a similar solution but that had been two decades ago, when existing technology simply wasn't good enough.

"It is an obvious problem and we were surprised that no-one else has done it," he said.

GreaseBoss has a long-term relationship at The Melt, which Mr Barnett said was instrumental in getting the startup on its feet.

"Melt were our first external investor, the believed in the problem and have helped take it from prototype level to something that worked in a lab to the point where they are now in the field, being used," he said.

"They give us proximity and reach into the Hunter Valley and into New South Wales - it is strategic.

"Aside from helping us validate it all, immediately after getting into Melt I quit my job. They believed in us."

Mr Barnett says Glencore were piloting the system in its Oaky Creek North site in Queensland.

He said GreaseBoss was aiming to launch its product to global markets in the second half of the year.

"Our first order was from a Brisbane company, the second from overseas - it will be a global product and we want to test and build it in Australia and have it as an export product," he said.

"Here we have all these multinationals running mining operations in our backyard and we want to build products that monetise those operations."

GreaseBoss was, he added, the starting point of other products in the pipeline.

"In our wildest dreams we want to be the Apple of industrial IOT," he said.

"We want our products so simple to use that anyone can, on every mine site and construction site in the world."

Our journalists work hard to provide local, up-to-date news to the community. This is how you can continue to access our trusted content:

IN THE NEWS: